Learning about the world you live in will help you feel part of it, and it will help you have something to write about in IELTS examinations. I have provided some links to great sites - some of them including talks given by university lecturers on different topics, as well as some of my own writing.

Here below are some of the things I have written or am still writing, about some of the important issues confronting us in the 21st Century. I hope you find them interesting and I hope they make you think too. Here is the first one.

Economics: the ‘downturn’ and our way out of it

We have built the global economy on the production of man-made desires, but now those scurrilous ‘needs’ are exposed for what they are, companies producing them topple like so many houses of cards.In recession, the first thing to go is that which is not vital – food stays, but that plasma TV we had set out heart on is out.

In the drive to economic growth, the world’s precious resources are being used up producing things we can well do without.I’m not a Luddite; I love my creature comforts as much as the next person, but I don’t define myself by the ones I own or enjoy.

Whatever the world’s economies are doing, we’ve still got to eat.The sector taken up by luxury goods is that part of the economy that is hurt the most when the going gets tough – and the jobs that go with them.And we are constantly reminded of that fact.

I dropped Economics early at University: for me, the study of the direction a field of corn wavers in the wind didn’t seem as important as the meteorology behind it – where the wind was coming from and what was making it blow so hard some days and not at all on others.

And neither did I enthuse over marketing – the man-made production of breezes, continuing the analogy a bit too far.

When the world’s economies do recover, as they will most surely do, it may well be on the back of producing those luxury products – high powered sports cars, and fur coats, that threaten the environment we are part of.

This incessant drive to economic growth, and our present path to economic recovery are not compatible with the future sustainability of our continued survival on Earth. However, we do seem to be inextricably linked to taking this particular direction, even as we observe the natural environment's inability to cope.